It's tough times for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus; after all Amazon's incredibly affordable Kindle Fire came out at the same time as did the new Nook Tablet. While those are fine products, they aren't full-fledged Android in all its glory tablets like the Tab 7 Plus. The Samsung runs Android OS 3.2 Honeycomb vs. the older Gingerbread 2.3 OS on the reader tablets, and the Samsung has all the standard hardware features like Bluetooth, a GPS and a mic that the Fire lacks (the Nook Tablet has a mic). For those of you who want to do it all with your Android tablet and not worry about rooting or hacking just to get the Android Market on your device, the Tab 7 Plus is for you.

Given downward pricing trends for tablets, the Galaxy Tab 7 Plus is on the pricey side. It's $399 for the 16 gig WiFi version, and T-Mobile's 3G version is priced similarly. That's twice the cost of the Fire, but the Tab 7 Plus has more features. It's a bit expensive compared to the Acer Iconia Tab A100 7" Honeycomb tablet and the $299 HTC Flyer. As you'd expect from Samsung, some of the benefits of ownership including the Tab 7 Plus' thinness and light weight. It's the lightest 7" tablet at 12 ounces.

The tablet is also extremely fast with Quadrant benchmarking it at 3536, and it's turned in the fastest Sunspider JavaScript test score we've seen yet for a mobile: 1738. The Galaxy Tab 7 Plus runs on a 1.2GHHz Exynos CPU (that's why it's so fast), and it has a gig of RAM and 16 gigs of storage. There's a microSD card slot (something the Tab 10.1 lacks), but no HDMI out. You'll have to buy Samsung's adapter to convert their 30 pin port to HDMI. The tablet does have dLNA for wireless streaming to an HD TV, and it supports MPEG4, XVID and DIVX video formats.